What’s Up With That?

I feel obligated—even as a person who came to HBO’s Game of Thrones very late in the game—to mention how surprised I was to hear of the series only being nominated for one Golden Globe award. I’m sure a lot of fans are similarly surprised, if not shocked. This is not to take anything away from anyone else who may have been nominated: I’m sure there are many deserving individuals and projects, and obviously there’s a certain amount of subjectivity in any awards selection process. Having said all that, I still say that something about this doesn’t seem to add up. Not even nominated, with the exception of one acting nomination for Kit Harington? With extremely high production values across the board and an excellent cast from top to bottom?

Of course, you know I’m old and cynical, but it almost seems to me that GOT and/or the people behind it must have gotten on someone’s blacklist. Maybe you’re about to suggest some other programs I might want to see that you consider superior to GOT, and I won’t argue with anyone’s choices—but if there truly are that many programs equal to or better than a cultural behemoth like GOT, I’m stunned. Television as a whole must be more quality-based than I realized.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve started to look at many things differently, and my pleasure in watching awards programs is never really unalloyed. Hollywood is just as political as any other place, if not more so, and you have to wonder what goes on behind the scenes of some of the industry organizations. The degree to which people respect the institutions and the nominating processes determines the actual and perceived value of winning—after all, who wants to be the recipient of a rigged award? Nobody wins in that case.

It’s possible that some Hollywood Foreign Press Association members thought GOT had peaked already and regarded the last season as less worthy of recognition based on all the fan controversies about unexpected plot developments and the respective fates of various characters, although to me that should have little bearing on the way an industry organization chooses to recognize quality. Some of the conversation about story directions got rather heated at the time, which is kind of understandable considering how many loyal viewers the program had and how embedded GOT was in the cultural psyche over the course of its run. Naturally, fans have opinions, which weren’t always expressed graciously but sprang, I think, from a genuine love for the series and a reluctance to see it end at all, much less in a way unfavorable to beloved characters.

I had much less invested in this series than people who had watched it from the beginning, but I still found myself developing favorites and feeling that I would be unhappy if this person or that person didn’t survive the Battle of Winterfell or the Battle at King’s Landing—in fact, I wasn’t happy with the final outcome on some levels, although that didn’t stop me from thinking the episodes were quite well done. I actually admired the show’s writers for having the courage to make some controversial choices, and certainly having everyone anyone remotely liked survive would not have seemed realistic either.

I would think fans would be more up-in-arms about GOT being nearly excluded from awards in its final season than they are about unpopular plot choices. Although it would make no difference in decisions that have already been made and would be largely symbolic, to me it would be more appropriate to start a petition scolding the Hollywood Foreign Press Association for overlooking, in its final season, one of the finest and most well-produced spectacles ever to hit the small screen than to continue to agitate for rewrites. I mean, the opening credits! The dragons, my God! The battles! The cinematography! The costumes! The dialogue! Good heavens, it boggles the mind.

Like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid of an earlier era, I’m having to ask myself, of the HFPA, “Who are those guys?” Did they collectively drink a six-pack apiece and pass out during the screenings? Did they read the Cliff Notes version of the scripts? Did they have a mass hallucination?

Wordplay Advises the Lovelorn

“Oh, so you want to know what I think?”

Dear Wordplay,

I can’t seem to meet any eligible men where I live. I’ve tried taking classes, going to cultural events, going on blind dates, and using dating apps. People tell me I’m too picky, but when I finally like someone (which happens occasionally), they say I’m not picky enough. (Those usually don’t work out either, BTW.) Do you have any advice? —Pining

Dear Pining,

Yes. From what you’ve described, you’ve taken sensible actions that have yielded no results. You suggest that perhaps it’s the place you live in, and there could be some truth in this. My suggestion is to follow your interests a little further, to travel to places that interest you and see what happens. If you’re not ready to move yet, consider an extended vacation or sabbatical in a place where you think you might meet interesting men. Wherever you think that might be, you’re probably right.

Dear Wordplay,

I don’t know what to do. I heard some gossip about a girl I’ve liked for a long time, and it concerns her boyfriend. I heard that when she moved away from their hometown to take a job in another city, he tried to have her offed. No, seriously. That’s how pissed he was. She doesn’t seem ever to have heard this, because she moved back home, and they got back together. I’m not exactly a disinterested party, because her boyfriend knows I had a big crush on her for a long time, and I’m afraid that if I say something and it turns out not to be true, I’ll look like a jealous turd. The problem is, I heard this from more than one source, and it seems like it could be true. For years, I’ve been heartsick over it and just hoping it never happened. Should I say something to her?—Caring but Rational

Dear Caring but Rational,

I have just made the decision for you. By publishing your concern on the Internet, I’ve ensured that it will catch someone’s eye and get back to whoever needs to know. If no truth, you remain anonymous, and little (probably) harm done, but if the shoe fits—well, your conscience is at ease. What people do with the information is up to them, but I think a real friend would want someone he cared about to know. Like you, I’m hoping it isn’t true, but neither your hope or mine has any bearing on what may or may not have happened.

Dear Wordplay,

I’m a gay man who has been in a long-term relationship. My partner has a close female friend that I have lately discovered I have romantic feelings for. Neither she or my partner has any suspicion that I am bisexual. I’m having trouble disguising my feelings and really think this woman may be my soul mate. Is there any hope that if I let her know how I feel, she might reciprocate the feelings? We all get along well and have a great time when we’re together.—All But Married

Dear All But Married,

I suspect that if you make your feelings known, the situation you described in your last statement will immediately cease to exist. Since both the woman and your partner think you are gay, any suggestion otherwise on your part is likely to be unwelcome to both of them. If you really think you want to be with a woman instead of your partner, it’s time to think about whether a separation might be in order, but before you do that, try to figure out what’s really going on. Is this woman just a safe object for your feelings because you know she’ll never reciprocate them? Are you investing emotional energy in this crush to avoid facing things in your current relationship? If you really want to be with her, how likely do you think it is that she’ll throw her close friend over for someone she’s always thought of as gay? Would that perhaps be a little awkward? Lots of questions for you to consider.

Dear Wordplay,

I’m an FBI agent and have been married to my current spouse for 25 years. The spark has gone out of our marriage entirely as far as I’m concerned, though I think I’ve mostly kept my feelings concealed from my wife. She seems content with the house and kids, but I feel sometimes that I’m suffocating and don’t know how to break it to her. There are opportunities professionally for me to go undercover; for instance, I could develop a rare form of cancer, “die,” and be placed in another city with a new identity. I’m good at my job (cyber crime), and my superiors would jump at the chance to place me in another setting. I’m wondering what you think about the ethics of changing my life in this way. I’d be serving my country and getting out of a painful situation at the same time.—Public Servant

Dear Public Servant,

Wow, how selfless you are. Glad to know there are people like you out there. I suggest, though, that using your job to end your marriage is going about it in the wrong way. If you really want to get out of your marriage, consider a trial separation, and then if you still feel the same way after, say, a year, ask your wife for a divorce. You will both feel better for the honesty. A spouse of 25 years deserves more than a fake funeral.

Dear Wordplay,

I fell in love with a woman after I spied on her while she was skinny-dipping in a hotel pool. I don’t really want to go into the whys and wherefores of how I happened to be there, but seriously, I was caught off guard. What I mean is, I was watching her from my window, and I didn’t know she was going to take her robe off, but she did, and I haven’t been the same man since. I have reason to think that she might one day return my feelings, and I just want to know—am I obligated to tell her what happened? I mean, actually, I was following her, and it’s kind of a long story, but . . . The problem is, she’s a big privacy advocate, has given lectures on it for the local university, has made it known in no uncertain terms what she thinks of spying (in a general way, not as it relates to skinny dipping). She’s practically a Fourth Amendment scholar.—Trying to Do What’s Right

Dear Trying to Do What’s Right,

1. Do you, by any chance, have any connection to the public servant in the previous question? There just seems to be an awful lot of spying going on.

2. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!

Dear Wordplay,

I feel like this fellow I don’t know well is trying to let me know that he likes me. A story got back to me that he happened to be looking out the window when I took a 2 a.m. skinny dip in a hotel pool while on vacation years ago. It’s kind of an odd story, but I have no reason not to like him. The funny thing is, I know what he looks like without his clothes on, too, though I’d rather not go into that part of it. Do you think there’s any possibility that something that started out like this could have a future? Technically, he was spying on me.—This Will Sound Strange, But . . .

Dear This Will Sound Strange, But,

I may have to erect an ethical barrier here. I’m starting to feel like the Wall in Pyramus and Thisbe. To answer your question, I don’t really see a problem based on what you’ve told me so far. How many people get a chance to check out the goods, not to put too fine a point on it, before they’ve even had dinner-and-a-movie? And technically, you waived your right to privacy by taking your clothes off in public, although I’ll grant you, most people would expect to go unobserved at that hour of the night. For the future, I suggest that you try to meet sometime when both of you have your clothes on. I am kind of curious as to your side of the story, but I’m too much of a professional to take a prurient interest in something that’s none of my business.

Thanksgiving Greeting

Wordplay wishes you a Happy Thanksgiving. We’d like to blog about something profound, but our thoughts are too full of turkey and dressing, as yours are, too, no doubt. I will say that while I was driving across town around five o’clock this afternoon, the autumn light was beautiful. There’s really nothing else to say about that, though.

Taking Martin Scorsese Up on It

I thought previously about devoting a post to director Martin Scorsese’s comments on the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but I hadn’t had time to read the original interview in which the comments were made. I gathered that Mr. Scorsese felt his comments had been misconstrued in some quarters and wanted to understand for myself what he was saying. This morning I read both the Empire magazine article in which he responded to a question about Marvel superhero movies and a follow-up New York Times opinion piece in which he clarified and expanded on his earlier comments.

If I’m understanding Mr. Scorsese correctly, his objection to the films is two-fold: he perceives that they are 1.) designed, packaged, and marketed by studio executives with a cynical eye toward the bottom line and a wish to spoonfeed what’s essentially pablum to the public and 2.) they are also essentially “dead” artistically (though not without fine production values in many cases). The first objection is easily understood, but I’ve been sitting here thinking about the second one for at least an hour. It concerns me as someone who studies myth because the Marvel universe is full of superheroes who are, if not directly out of some ancient pantheon or other—like Thor and Loki—then more recently created mythic characters with attributes and histories of their own.

What Mr. Scorsese said separates cinema from this mass-distributed audiovisual entertainment is the lack of risk undertaken by the latter, the impossibility of anything unexpected or revelatory taking place within a Marvel-type movie. I believe he views Marvel movies as formulaic, paint-by-numbers products aimed at the lowest common denominator. I think I’m characterizing what he meant correctly in saying that he views a cinematic experience as a ritual in the true sense of the word: film actually has the power to effect change in the person watching, to transform his or her thinking, emotional range, moral sense, or view of the world, and I completely agree with him that cinema can do all these things (as can other art forms).

Mr. Scorsese seems to perceive superhero movies, on the other hand, as falling into the category of spectacle: showy, frequently impressive on the visual level, and capable of stimulating some primal place in the brain that responds to grandiose gestures, noise, color, and gross physical action. In this representation, superhero movies are more circus performance than film, capable of manipulating the viewer with heart-stopping visuals that are nonetheless scripted and predictable. They may entertain you, but they will not change you.

Of course, I’m referring here to the categories of ritual and spectacle outlined by anthropologist John J. MacAloon, which can be used to make sense of various types of public events and performances. I’ve found Mr. MacAloon’s categories helpful in thinking about performances as diverse as the Olympic Games, bullfights, and State of the Union addresses, and they certainly seem applicable in this case. So if I were to characterize what I think Mr. Scorsese is saying in terms of Mr. MacAloon’s thinking, true cinema is transformative, like Greek tragedy, and superhero movies are mere spectacle, like the Colosseum extravaganzas of Ancient Rome.

Like Mr. Scorsese, I am a strong proponent of the individual artistic voice, and I do agree that projects produced “by committee” (no matter what type of project we’re talking about) are in danger of being homogenized or smoothed down by “groupthink.” I don’t want anyone else telling me how to write, and here I may be an exception, because plenty of people are proponents of writer’s workshops and craft classes. I have tried both and am not opposed to them but came away with the feeling that you learn to write by reading, writing, and living. Certain things are hard to transmit to someone else, as I learned during my stint as a writing teacher.

You can explain punctuation and mechanics to people and show them examples of good writing, but . . . Style? Voice? That instinctual je ne sais quoi that helps you find your way to just the right way of saying something so that people will remember it and be moved by it? You absorb other people’s writing through your pores without thinking about it too much, but when you go to do it yourself, you have to shut everyone else out and go with what’s in your head and heart.

To that extent, I agree with Mr. Scorsese that individual voices and points of view are vital. I guess I part ways with him on the notion of superhero movies having no “soul,” if you want to put it that way. I would probably place movies like his and the Marvel films on the same sliding scale, according to whether they are more or less subtle in the way they embody archetypes and present mythic themes. The superhero movies may paint with broad brushstrokes and rely more on action and special effects than a film like Mr. Scorcese’s The Age of Innocence (just to pick an example); in them, archetypes are writ large so that they are instantly recognizable, and the heroic themes are plainly evident. I would argue, though, that these films are just as ritualistic as anything a more nuanced filmmaker might create.

Don’t think someone can’t be inspired by or feel the power of a heroic character in a movie just because it’s an “audiovisual spectacle.” I’m remembering the fan who commented online that in his severe health struggles (with diabetes and some other issues, as I recall), he asked himself what Tyrion, his favorite character in Game of Thrones, would do in his shoes, and that is what helped him get through the experience. This may be a controversial idea in some quarters, but I don’t think it’s any different than someone finding strength by calling on the gods of his religious beliefs, whatever they may be. To paraphrase Carl Jung, as I did recently, I believe the gods have become our movie heroes (and our athletes and our rock stars). They have in no way disappeared, even if you’re not religious. There’s a certain responsibility that comes with the territory of celebrity that not everyone wishes to take on (or even believes in), but nevertheless it’s there.

In films that rely more on dialogue, plot, and understated themes, you may have to think about the characters and events to understand the archetypal content behind them, but I’m arguing that even in original screenplays with no reference to any preexisting story, the same basic categories of human experience are the building blocks, whether or not you call them archetypes or myths. People combine them in new ways, and new myths can always be created. I haven’t seen Mr. Scorsese’s latest, The Irishman, but I’m willing to bet that if I went to see it, I’d be able to find just as many mythic characters as there are in The Avengers—they may initially look just as ordinary as you or me, but that’s the point. When we react to a mythic character or image, we’re projecting something that’s actually inside of us; most of us look rather ordinary on the outside, but what about what’s inside?

By the way, and I say this respectfully, Mr. Scorsese’s movies, in my experience of them and from what I know of the ones I haven’t seen, are pretty heavy themselves on the spectacle end of things. I realized today, while looking at a catalog of his films, that the half dozen or so I have seen are the ones that are somewhat untypical of the vast body of his work. Violence and crime are themes he explores extensively (and graphically, if the descriptions I hear are accurate). I have seen none of those for the plain reason that I find visual depictions of extreme violence to be disturbing. I’ve missed a number of highly acclaimed films for that reason. The one film of Mr. Scorsese’s I most regret not seeing is Raging Bull, and I plan to rectify that omission now that I have a temporary subscription to Amazon Prime. Whether it will leave me sleepless or have me feeling bruised for days, like other films by other directors have in the past, I can’t say at this point. At least it doesn’t seem to involve weapons.

I suppose the final point I’m making is that I don’t see the division between ritual and spectacle that I think Mr. Scorsese is using as the criterion for differentiating between true cinema as opposed to mass entertainment. His own films are full of spectacle, as are those of many other distinguished directors. Many of the superhero movies are full of transformative characters, themes, and episodes. Is it possible to make a movie that truly is devoid of any transformative content? Maybe, but I would place all of them on the same sliding scale I was talking about. Part of the power of any movie depends on how skillfully the story is told, and even a respectable production with famous names and a big budget may miss the mark if no one gets it.

The Deer and the Serpent

(A Short Story)

It had been a long illness, and by the time she came back to herself, many seasons had passed; truth be told, it had been many years. Much had slipped away that would never come back, and that was the most difficult thing to face, the relentlessness of time. She wasn’t young when the sickness came over her, and once it ebbed away, she felt herself to be old. Old and unable to reconcile herself with her misfortune, though, curiously, with as strong a will to live as ever.

In the autumn of the year of her recovery, she wakened from a dream in which someone had been speaking to her, and it had seemed important, but she was unable to recall what had been said. Elaine had noticed a new sensitivity to light, sound, and touch, which she was unsure whether to attribute to a lingering side effect of the sickness or the result of having been confined to a darkened room for so long. She clearly remembered herself as she had been in the last days before she fell ill, never suspecting the sudden change that was about to take place. She felt like the same person she had been, only somehow—stretched? Or was it diminished? Even her own face in the mirror did not reveal the answer. Was she stronger for having overcome what everyone had said would be terminal, or would she forever be less than she could have been? She had had many hopes before disappearing into the netherworld of illness.

As the weeks went by, Elaine grew impatient to feel at home again in her own life, but the quality of reality itself seemed to have changed. People smiled at her and were kind, even people she didn’t know well. Everyone, even strangers, somehow seemed to understand that she’d been through something monstrous. It was curiously unsettling to be sitting in a restaurant or walking down the sidewalk and have a stranger give her what appeared to be a knowing look. What she at first attributed to the speed with which news of a calamity traveled she later began to think was simply odd. The city she lived in was not that small, so there seemed to be no explanation for the way in which the number of people who knew about her could have grown so large.

She was unsure sometimes whether people were speaking to her or to someone else; she found herself pondering pieces of overhead conversation that seemed inexplicably to have some meaning for her. I’m losing my mind, she thought to herself . . . But trying to ignore the sensation was only partially successful. Going home and lying down in the dark, away from people, was the very thing she didn’t want to do, and yet merely going to the grocery store was sometimes enough to exhaust her and drive her into seclusion for the remainder of the day.

Not long before her illness, she had been stalked by an acquaintance, and the strangeness of that experience remained with her, so that she was unable to tell if the feeling she had lately developed of having someone always watching her was an echo of that experience, or a new development. Something seemed constantly to be hovering just outside the corner of her eye, a vague presence, but when she looked straight at it, there was never anything there. Once, at the library, she had the impression of someone disappearing around a corner just as she was turning in that direction. Another time she caught sight of curtains twitching closed above her, just as she looked up, preparing to enter a friend’s apartment building. In both cases, she knew someone had been there, but she could not have given a single identifying detail. She did not feel threatened, exactly, but unsettled rather, and uncertain.

Once she found a purple calla lily on her windshield and could not determine how it had gotten there. Another time she was sure she heard a man’s voice call her name as she driving down a seemingly empty street, the second syllable trailing off mournfully as her forward momentum carried her away. Then there was the time she went to the Y, certain she had two bathing suits in her gym bag but only able to find one of them, no matter how thoroughly she searched pockets and compartments. Later that night, when she began to rearrange the contents of her bag, she found the missing suit and was unable to account for how she could have missed it earlier. It seemed to have been removed and then replaced, as strange as that explanation seemed.

She began to wake up in the mornings from dreams of having had someone with her throughout the night, some of which were mere impressions of a soft voice and an embrace, and some of which were electrically erotic, though the sheets and bedclothes were always exactly as they had been when she went to bed. She had no impression of anything in the room having been disturbed, but something in herself seemed to be stirring, like a slowly uncoiling snake. Once, on an unusually warm Indian summer night, she stayed out on the sleeping porch, awakening with an impression of stars being tangled in her hair and a crescent moon hanging from her ear. When she sat up and looked toward the backyard, orange and yellow leaves were eddying down from gently swaying branches, and there was a susurration in the air, a long-drawn out sigh, though the night was cloudy, and there was no moon. The night is alive, Elaine thought, wondering why that was true. And then she thought, why do I feel so strange?

Finally, she decided to tell her friend Moxie, one day over lunch, what had been happening. “You know, Moxie, if I didn’t know better, I’d say I have a ghostly lover. I don’t know how else to describe it,” she said, as they were lingering over coffee one damp November day. After she described the things that had taken place, Moxie, who was a physicist at the university and nobody’s fool, looked her right in the eye. “Well, you’ve already been through menopause, so we can eliminate hot flashes from the list of suspects.”

“Yes, I thought about that. It’s more like being an adolescent again, without the acne. Well, not quite that. It’s a little more mysterious.”

“An incubus?”

“Well, I hope not. I don’t know quite what that is, but it doesn’t sound like something sustainable.”

“I was going to ask you if you’d been reading “Kubla Khan” again.

Elaine laughed then. “Oh, ‘Beware, Beware, his flashing eyes, his floating hair.’ Something like that, I suppose. But that could also describe a falling angel.”

“What does he look like?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I can’t see him clearly,” said Elaine, who was not about to admit that she had glimpsed his face in her dreams and that he was spectacularly handsome. “I don’t know what I’ve got on my hands here, an overly active imagination, lingering effects of disease, or someone real who’s actually hanging on the margins of my life somehow. I don’t suppose either an angel or a demon can open the trunk of a car.”

“Well, that’s the part that makes it difficult for me to dismiss,” said Moxie, putting down her coffee cup. “I remember you putting that extra suit in the gym bag that day we were going to the beach because you didn’t know which one looked better. And how big can a gym bag be? It’s not bottomless, surely.”

“I don’t know, Moxie. Half the time it seems like this magical thing, something I hadn’t looked for at all, and half the time it reminds me of all that trouble I had with Josie following me around. Too ephemeral to put your finger on. Why would someone hover like that?”

“Everybody knows about your illness and all that business before. Maybe someone’s just a little hesitant.”

“Thanks for not dismissing it. I just wish I could figure out what’s happening and why.”

“I think we don’t have enough evidence to decide one way or the other,” Moxie said judiciously. “So we’ll just have to wait for further developments.” She was always practical. As indeed, Elaine had always considered herself to be.

Later that night, while driving home on the expressway, Elaine glanced at the freeway sign hanging over her lane. She was unable to say later whether it actually said, “You’re in my dreams, too” or “Two miles to Deane Street” because she was distracted by the sight of a falling star in her left field of vision. (She and Moxie had been discussing the Leonids meteor shower just a few hours previously, so this was not a totally unexpected event, just an astonishing one.) Ten miles farther on, she was passed by a fast-moving car in the next lane over. She had a chance to read “ILU VYU” on the license plate before the car sped away, disappearing into the night under a blue-black sky brimming with stars.

When she got out of the car in her driveway a few minutes later, a large shape detached itself from the shadows under the oak tree on the lawn and moved slowly away: a deer, crowned with antlers.

Election Day Blues

Election Day was not a holiday for me, and I find myself here at the end of it a little tired and without a topic. Some people in the store today were talking politics, and while I at first gave my opinion freely, I later decided to stay out of it. I respect people having different opinions from mine and was actually rather envious of people who came into the store with “I Voted” stickers. It’s been a while since I felt sure enough of anything politically to be convinced I knew what I was doing when I went to the polls. The more I read and thought about things deeply, the more confused I got. Once I realized that figuring out people’s positions on the issues really wasn’t enough, and that people whose ideas were much like mine weren’t necessarily the best people to vote for for other reasons, I was both sadder and wiser but more clueless than ever.

I think I would have a difficult time teaching information literacy these days when it comes to politics. Perhaps it’s asking too much to expect people to read the politicians’s souls and see into their minds, and simply making a choice and voting for someone is the best you can do, but I feel I was a little too blithely unaware in the past when I developed enthusiasms for people, and “Once bitten, twice shy.” I felt that way about Bernie Sanders during the last election—I really liked a lot of his ideas and the things he stood for, but something would not let me be wholeheartedly enthusiastic. I was always waiting for the other shoe to drop, and this was despite the fact that I saw he was being treated unfairly by the media, especially early on. Any time Bernie Sanders is made out to be clueless on race relations, something he has been passionate about all his life, you know there’s a tremendous amount of spin going on. But I kept thinking, “What don’t I know about him? And not just about him, but all of them?”

One of these days, I’ll get back into full participation mode in our democracy, and I look forward to that happening. It’s not out of apathy that I have been hanging back, but rather out of literal fear that endorsing the wrong person would bring about tragic, irreversible consequences, and this is despite the fact that I know there are good people in both parties. It’s been a long time since I was that teenage girl whose dad drove her to the polls to vote in her first primary, so elated later on that fall to have voted for the winning candidate.

Seemingly Abandoned Places in the Mind

I’ve searched high and low for something else to blog about this week and couldn’t find anything other than what’s really arrested my attention, a video (now almost a year old) that came across my radar only recently. I’m speaking of Hozier’s “Movement” video, starring Ukrainian ballet dancer Sergei Polunin, directed by Christopher Barrett and Luke Taylor. Occasionally, I get interested in something to the point that I end up studying it closely; this week, I’ve almost felt I was in film school, so many times have I pored over this short film, scene by scene.

I first heard the song, an ardent expression of sexual love, at Starbucks, and liked the music and Hozier’s passionate performance without really hearing all of the lyrics. When I found the video online, my initial reaction was, “This is an unforgettable performance, and some of the scenes really resonate with me in a strange way, though I don’t know why.” (The film itself is sensual but not explicit.) Mr. Polunin is the only actor in the film, appearing as three (no, make that four) different characters. 

The ballet sequences are extraordinary for their sheer physicality and expressiveness, and Mr. Polunin also has a remarkable ability to convey emotion even when he isn’t dancing. I’ve never seen a more mesmerizing performance by a male dancer. If you think of male ballet dance performance as sissified, this video will knock that idea entirely out of your head forever. While I recognize some classical technique in the video, there seems to be a mix of styles in the performance. (Bouncing off the walls, literally, isn’t something I’ve often seen in ballet.)

At the beginning, Mr. Polunin’s character, dressed in street clothes, appears to be having an internal debate of some kind and seems both troubled and weary. He gets out of the van he’s sitting in and walks up the steps to an abandoned industrial building. As he pauses on the threshold, another Mr. Polunin (seemingly out of nowhere) emerges from the van behind him, from the opposite door. The second character, in torn clothes and showing signs of some barely suppressed but strong emotion, follows the first character into the building. What follows is a series of solos, duets, and group performances as the characters dance their way through the building from the ground floor to the roof.

The first character appears most interested in dancing solo and at times seems unaware of the presence of any other characters. I related to the first character as someone absorbed in creating or expressing himself without reference to what anyone else is doing. His relationship to the second character is difficult to gauge; at times they dance in tandem, but the overall impression one gets is that the first character is continually moving away from the second one, while at the same time dealing with some strong, unresolved emotion concerning his presence. The second character is almost hungrily appreciative of the first character while also seeming angry; the first character continually runs away while seeming at times to be waiting for the second character to appear.

But then who is the strange, almost ethereal figure in white who appears in the second half of the video, seemingly anticipating the arrival of Character 1 while erecting a barrier between them? Why are there two Character 1s in the same scene, one dancing, and one sitting almost unnoticed against a pillar in the foreground? Why is Character 2 continually stumbling, recovering, and hitting the wall? Why does Character 1 suddenly seem fearful while fleeing to the roof in the final sequence, with Character 2 in hot pursuit? And if he is fearful, why does he, at the last, stand with his back to the other character, seemingly unconcerned as the latter approaches him at high speed with his hand outstretched?

You know enough by now to realize that I cannot answer these questions definitively and that there is likely a lot of layering going on. I think I saw myself in all of the characters at one time or another and possibly you would, too. My general feeling is that Character 2 feels a passion for Character 1 that is being both encouraged and rebuffed, which explains 2’s somewhat haggard appearance. He appears at one point in a doorway, not quite patient but certainly in command of himself and expectant, only to have Character 1 slip by him once more. 

The dreamlike quality of this video doesn’t lend itself to a clear, linear explanation. From a depth perspective, I can see all of the characters as different aspects of a single person, the ego, the id (the hungrily pursuing Character 2 who obviously thinks it’s time to come out to play), and the superego, the third figure. Perhaps what appears to be a duplicate of Character 1 is actually the Self, the fourth factor that completes the personality, although he does not appear to be altogether down with everything transpiring behind him.

I encourage you to watch the video and see for yourself. As a piece of visual, musical, dramatic, and dance art, it’s spectacular; as a type of shadow play depicting the workings of the unconscious, it’s eerily on point (or en pointe, maybe); and as a story of passion and sexual tension, it’s spellbinding. Character 2’s appearance in the doorway with all his tattoos on display as he watches and waits is the central image of the film around which all else is built. Character 1 seems to be leaving him behind after that, and yet the final scene on the roof tells a different story. While seemingly in a reverie, Character 1 has allowed Character 2 to erase almost all the distance between them. What will happen when Character 2 touches him with his outstretched hand?